Tag: Food

As a side effect of this Cold From Hell I’m getting over, my sense of smell keeps fading in and out. Mostly out. When I can smell anything at all, it’s severely attenuated. Most of the time, everything just smells kind of like cardboard box. I don’t know if that’s what I’m smelling, or if that’s just some trick my brain is playing because it’s not getting any valid input. Either way, it’s weird. But it makes for some interesting tasting experiments.

+ Sliced black olives: a kind of metallic sensation, but nothing I’d really call a “taste”.
+ Stale water cracker: pretty much the same as a stale water cracker usually tastes. Which is to say, more flavorful than the olives, which had no taste at all. I was able to taste something else bread-y the other day; I wonder if there’s some component of bread products that’s working on my taste buds alone.
+ Stale red wine: ick. Less icky than usual, though. Made my tongue feel dry, and there was a kind of sharp sensation at the sides of my mouth, but none of the awful rotten grape-ness that usually turns me off wine. I’m still not drinking it, but I’d rather drink it like this than with my sense of smell intact.
+ Raw garlic: stings my tongue. Quite a lot, actually. But if I hadn’t known what it was, I couldn’t have told you it was garlic.
+ Glass of water so I wouldn’t be exhaling garlic breath on Cam: kind of like cardboard. Again, I wonder if that’s my brain’s response to a lack of input.
+ Red curry sauce from Trader Joe’s: pleasant, but I couldn’t tell you quite how. It’s probably the mouthfeel. I had some of this a few weeks ago, and remember it as delicious. Now it’s just a kind of pleasant, bland mush.
+ Hall’s honey-lemon “mentho-lyptus” cough drop: sweet (in a non-specific way; could have been honey, could have been corn syrup) and cool, and then for about fifteen seconds quite unpleasant as it opened something up and I was able to taste the garlic still in my mouth.
+ Raw yellow onion: except for a brief stinging sensation in my nose, it might as well have been a tasteless apple.
+ Theo spicy chile dark chocolate (70% cacao): earthy and a little sweet; I think I’m tasting the bitterness in the chocolate more than the sweetness. The hot pepper I can still sense as hot.
+ Chunk of canned tomato: normally, eating this would make me gag. I always thought it was the texture, but I guess texture is only part of the problem. I’m still not thrilled with the texture, but without the taste, it’s just not-good, not actively-bad.
+ Minced ginger: I could smell a little ginger when I stuck my nose in the jar, but I couldn’t taste anything when I ate a dollop.
+ Dry Cheerios: like the memory of cheerios; that is to say, there’s a flavor there, kind of, but it’s more an echo than a primary component.

Also, I seem to have been treating Cam differently for the last few days. I’ll need to make a conscious effort not to do that, because I think when I can’t smell her, it’s like she’s not really there. Not cool.

I made refried beans for dinner today, and was struck by how few actual beans were in the 25 ounce can of beans I used. These are Westbrae Natural black beans, which we’ve been using for a while, and I don’t remember being so surprised before. Maybe this was a bad lot, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention before, but there was an awful lot of liquid in the cans I opened tonight. More than I expected, for sure. I decided to open another can and document its contents.

The unopened can weighed 837 grams, or about 29.5 ounces. After opening the can and draining off most of the liquid, the can weighed 433 grams, or about 15.25 ounces. That means 404 grams, or about 14.25 ounces, of liquid was drained off. That’s already more than half of the nominal 25 ounces the can’s supposed to contain.

After dumping out the beans, the can weighed 114 grams, or about 4 ounces. That means only 319 grams of the total weight was beans. That’s about 11.25 ounces. Just over 11 ounces of usable beans, out of a can labeled 25 ounces. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems… skimpy.

I wonder if I have any of their 15 ounce cans in the pantry? I’m curious how much of those by weight is actual beans, now. It wouldn’t surprise me if buying the smaller cans is a better deal, if this is typical.

We also have a bag of dried black beans, and a pressure cooker. I suppose what we really should be doing is just skipping the cans entirely.

Ian threw a party tonight, for the purpose of sampling some of the MREs from his preparedness kit he was replacing with fresher ones. The ones we ate tonight were packed in 1999, if I read the date codes correctly. This is well within their shelf life, frighteningly enough.

The side dishes were all fairly tasty. The applesauce tasted like applesauce, the cracker was bland but improved by the smooth peanut butter, the cookie was actually pretty tasty, and I hear the pop-tart was ok, although I didn’t try it. One person braved the instant coffee, and declared it not very coffee-like. Everyone loved the tiny tabasco bottles.

The entrees ranged wildly in quality. The surprise favorite was the “ham slice“. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised us; canned ham is fairly commonplace. It was salty, but I could see myself eating it without complaints in an emergency situation.

The “pork chop” was probably meant to be “chopped pork”, as there wasn’t anything I’d call a pork chop in it. I thought it was decent, reminiscent of Dinty Moore beef stew. Others declared it “poo“.

The pasta with alfredo-style sauce was clearly the loser. Nobody could stand more than a small taste of it. It smelled awful, the consistency was horrible, there was a disgusting aftertaste, and it looked like vomit. Heating it only made it worse, as the smell was able to propagate more quickly. I would eat this if I were starving to death, but I think that’s what it would take. I think I’d eat roadkill squirrel before I ate this.

The burrito was horrifying to look at, having taken on the texture and consistency of the bag it was packed in. Seriously, if you weren’t paying attention to what color bag it came in, you might not have been able to tell at first glance whether it had been unwrapped or not. And it smelled awful. Cold, it tasted pretty bad, too. Once it was heated up, it smelled worse, but tasted better. Overall, a wash. Much better than the alfredo-style pasta, though.

There were a bunch of other entrees, some of which went home with people to be used as gag gifts. We only tried those four, though. They look so innocent in their bags. I hope that the alfredo pasta is the worst of the lot, because if there was anything worse in one of the bags we didn’t open, I’d hate to think of anybody having to eat it.

Cam grew these awesome purple potatoes, and I boiled and mashed some of them tonight. They’re almost exactly the color of blackberry ice cream when they’re mashed. Oddly, the water I boiled them in turned green, not purple.